Thursday, January 18, 2007

Exploring the Learning Context in Art and Design

The University of the Arts organised a one day conference on 'Exploring the Learning Context in Art and Design'.

I went to interesting sessions on using Wiki's and making podcasts.

The former was a little frustrating as it was a little too 'introductory' for me. What was interesting was the tension between those who use and like 'Blackboard' and those, like me, who think it is a dinosaur of the prehistory of the Internet. It is not Web 2.0, not open source, not cool, no skins - and inappropriate for an institute like CSM which is at the forefront of design. I think we should change to Moodle - which is open source - or abandon a set Virtual Learning Environment altogether and put something together using tools that are out there already such as wiki, furl, second life etc.

Some good came out of it - which is that a group was set up for those interested in wiki. I came to the conclusion that I should have written about my work on wiki as am by now a veteran.

The second interesting session was on podcasting - this showed that the Mac is much easier to use for podcasting. Simply use the Mac's systems for recording - web cam and mic onboard and use Garageband3 to mash it up, and use Itunes to publish. I did not know that you can podcast pdfs.

The ease of production makes it clear that the difficulty is the content not the production - so still something that if I had more time I would like to explore.